Contents I. Introduction
Cloud computing is a paradigm for delivering IT resources such as storage, processing or data transmission, characterized by availability on demand across the Internet from a set of preexisting and configurable resources. The resources are not fully configured and implemented by humans but are assigned, quickly and conveniently, through automated procedures, starting from a pool of shared resources with other users, without the involvement of the user in the configuration process. When the user releases the resource, it is reconfigured in the initial state and made available in the shared pool of resources. This work focuses only on a part of the cloud computing world: the storage area that represents hardware devices, storage media, infrastructures, and non-volatile storage software of large amounts of electronic information. The concept of storage is tightly tied to the concept of the file system. The exploitation of a Cloud Distributed File System (CDFS) in a complex architecture, such as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud environment, leads to a stable and reliable system, which helps the cloud provider to achieve fault tolerance and to avoid all problems regarding storage for all purposes.
